×
Science

'Electronic Skin' Grafts Gadgets To Body 31

Posted by Soulskill from the mail-us-a-sase-to-receive-your-free-slashtoo dept.
sciencehabit writes "Researchers have developed ultrathin electronics that can be placed on the skin as easily as a temporary tattoo (abstract). The scientists hope the new devices will pave the way for sensors that monitor heart and brain activity without bulky equipment, or perhaps computers that operate via the subtlest voice commands or body movement. The devices can even be hidden under actual temporary tattoos to keep the electronics concealed, giving them potential applications for espionage."
Space

The Fate of the First Known Black Hole 67

Posted by Soulskill from the black-holes-and-revelations dept.
sciencehabit writes "Cygnus X-1 bears its name because it was the first source of x-rays found in the constellation Cygnus. In 1971, astronomers discovered that the x-rays came from the direction of a bright blue star whirling around a mysterious dark object. They speculated that the x-rays were resulting from material being torn away from the bright star and falling onto the dark object, perhaps a black hole. This year, astronomers established that Cygnus X-1 does indeed harbor a black hole, a dead star whose great gravity lets nothing, not even light, escape. Now that result has inspired a forecast for the system's future: The black hole will swallow even more mass from an unfortunate star circling it, then likely dash away on its own when its companion explodes."
HP

HP Drops Price Again For Its WebOS-Based iPad Challenger 296

Posted by timothy from the must-be-that-damn-apple-tax-at-work dept.
oxide7 writes with this selection from IBT: "Hewlett Packard reduced the price of its TouchPad tablet computer again, highlighting the uphill battle manufacturers will need to overcome as they go head-to-head against the dominant Apple iPad line of tablets. Much of a tablet's success is based on the ecosystem of apps that is available to the end-user. HP is far behind Apple or even the No.2 tablet platform, Google's Android."
Medicine

Why Some People Don't Have Fingerprints 159

Posted by Soulskill from the are-they-diabolical-masterminds dept.
sciencehabit writes "A small number of people in the world don't have fingerprints. The condition is known as adermatoglyphia, and one scientist has dubbed it the 'immigration delay disease' because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Now researchers have identified the genetic mutation behind the condition (abstract)."
Image

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day Screenshot-sm 220

Posted by samzenpus from the thanks-for-the-uptime dept.
alphadogg writes "It's the last Friday in July. Have you hugged your system administrators today? Bought a cake? Picked up the tab for lunch? There's still time to show your thanks for the unsung heroes who keep corporate desktops, servers and networks running. Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, an annual event thought up by IT pro Ted Kekatos. A company picnic and an old HP advertisement sparked the idea for the first SysAdmin Day, now in its 12th year."
Android

Android User Spends 60 Days In WebOS Land 137

Posted by timothy from the lives-to-tell-the-tale dept.
An anonymous reader writes "About six months ago, however, I began to wonder about how the other mobile products had grown. When the HTC HD7 crossed my path a little while ago, I decided to abandon my Nexus S and live among the Windows Phone folks for awhile. The experience was fun, but I eventually went back to my Nexus S. About a month later, I was presented with the opportunity to repeat the experiment, only this time with a Palm Pre Plus. With the HP Touchpad on its way, I wanted to get a feel for how WebOS worked, explore the differences, and take a look into the community that was still loyal to WebOS."
Communications

A High-Bandwidth Interplanetary Connection 99

Posted by timothy from the tell-your-data-to-get-bent dept.
sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that by twisting laser light, scientists could pack enough information into interplanetary beams to speed up extraterrestrial communications to the multi-gigabit level. The pulses would be passed through a hologram or multimode optical fiber, which twists the light. On the other side, a telescope would focus the light and a second hologram, or fiber would decode the signal. That could allow much more data-rich communication between, say, Earth and probes on Mars, the researchers say. Closer to home, the approach could provide Internet links of 100 gigabits per second."
Medicine

New Virus Jumps From Monkeys To Lab Workers 160

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-for-that dept.
sciencehabit writes "It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy."
Australia

Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools 118

Posted by timothy from the wake-me-when-they-enter-asynchronous-trade dept.
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science: "While exploring Australia's Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate. What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock. Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off. Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the first photographs of a wild fish using a tool." (Not everyone agrees that this constitutes tool use, says the article, in part because the "tool" isn't something that the fish can actually manipulate.)
Music

Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording 105

Posted by samzenpus from the before-cassette-tapes dept.
sciencehabit writes "The scratchy, 12-second audio clip of a woman reciting the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star doesn't sound like much. But the faint, 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique—appears to belong to the first record intended for sale to the public. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the early record is the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey."
HP

WebOS Chief: Don't Fret Over TouchPad Reviews 227

Posted by Soulskill from the pay-no-attention-to-the-OS-behind-the-mirror dept.
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "HP released their much trumpeted enterprise tablet, TouchPad, last week. This device was also the first to showcase WebOS in a tablet. The tablet received several harsh reviews, though some stated that the OS showed potential. Most of the criticism surrounded the sluggish software and the lack of apps. As reported by CNET, WebOS chief Jon Rubenstein rallies his troops by comparing the WebOS tablet's debut to that of Mac OS X, which also struggled early on. However, it is not entirely clear if the comparison is appropriate, since WebOS has existed since 2009, and OS X had the ability to run most classic OS 9 apps during the transition period. Nevertheless, one can certainly argue that the situation is similar in spirit." Another reader tips a related article which suggests that — for better or worse — Apple has succeeded in defining what a tablet should be, making it difficult for competitors to get a foothold in the market.
Medicine

Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors 111

Posted by Soulskill from the fried-tumors-are-a-delicacy-in-the-south dept.
sciencehabit writes "In a new study, a team found that injecting mice with tiny magnets and cranking up the heat eliminated tumors from the animals' bodies with no apparent side effects. The nanoparticles heat up when a magnetic field is applied, and because they are only injected into tumors, only cancerous cells get fried. Researchers hope the technique, known as magnetic hyperthermia, could be used in cancer patients, obviating the need for chemotherapy and radiation."
Medicine

LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches' 272

Posted by timothy from the why-do-you-say-even dept.
sciencehabit writes "Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study reveal that six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD, showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of the attacks for weeks or months. And some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year after they were treated with the compound." I'm told, by people with reason to know, that the hallucinogenic variety has the same effect on cluster headaches.
Portables

There Oughta Be a Standard: Laptop Power Supplies 482

Posted by timothy from the watch-them-make-it-lefthanded-micro-usb-3 dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Every mobile device you own has its own power supply and its own proprietary plug. There oughta be a better way, says Alfred Poor. Fortunately, he reports, the IEEE is coming to the rescue. "Their Universal Power Adapter for Mobile Devices (UPAMD) Working Group is developing a new standard that will not just address the needs of laptops and tablets, but will be intended to work with just about any electronics device that required between 10 and 240 watts of power," Poor writes. It's about darned time." If there's one thing I wish for all laptop power supplies, it's that they would license from Apple (or work around, patent-wise) the magnet attachment system that makes cable-tripping far less dangerous to man or beast, compared to a few years ago.
Space

New Find Boosts Prospects For Life On Distant Moons 98

Posted by samzenpus from the I-wonder-who-owns-that-moon dept.
sciencehabit writes "Imagine life on an Earth-like moon, one so close to its gas giant host that its landscape is bathed in a dusklike planetary glow. Such places are not only possible but also probable, according to a new study, which finds that as many as 5% of gas giant planets orbiting their stars at Earth-like distances may harbor habitable 'exomoons.' According to simulations, alien gas giants (like our Jupiter and Saturn) could pull in earth-like planets from the interior of their young solar systems. Though many of these planets would crash into the gas giants or later be flung into space, some would evolve stable orbits and stable climates, eventually setting the stage for life."
Crime

FBI Seizes Servers In Virginia 405

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
Axolotl_Rose writes "The FBI has seized servers belonging to several clients of a hosting company in Reston, VA, disrupting service for many other clients. 'In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the FBI, not our company. In the night FBI has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.” Mr. Ostroumow said that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.'"
Science

The Iceman's Last Meal 116

Posted by Soulskill from the bet-it-was-twinkies dept.
sciencehabit writes "Less than two hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat, according to a new study. Armed with Ötzi's newly sequenced genome and a detailed dental analysis, scientists have also found that the Iceman had brown eyes (not blue, as commonly assumed) and probably wasn't much of a tooth brusher. Dental analysis shows that the Iceman suffered a blunt force trauma to two teeth — possibly a blow to the mouth — at least several days before his death and was plagued by both periodontal disease and cavities."
Government

Military Drone Attacks Are Not 'Hostile' 892

Posted by Soulskill from the napalm-hugs-and-frag-grenade-kisses dept.
sanzibar writes "Not satisfied with the legal conclusion of the DOJ, the Obama administration found other in-house lawyers willing to declare a bomb dropped from a drone is not 'hostile'. The strange conclusion has big implications in determining the President's compliance with the law. If drone strikes are in fact hostile and the Libyan campaign continues past Sunday, he may very well be breaking the law."
Government

11 Pathogens Pose Big Security Risk For Research 115

Posted by timothy from the in-the-glovebox-please dept.
sciencehabit writes "A United States federal panel of scientists and security experts has identified 11 microorganisms that it wants designated as Tier 1 select agents, a new category of biological agents that would be subject to higher security standards than other pathogens and toxins used in biomedical research. The category would include anthrax, Ebola, Variola major and Variola minor (the two viruses that cause small pox), the Marburg virus, the virus that causes foot and mouth disease, and bacterial strains that produce the botulinum neurotoxin. At the same time, the panel has recommended dropping 19 pathogens and six toxins from the broader list of 82 agents that are currently governed by the select agent program."
HP

HP Sues Oracle For Dropping Itanium Support 153

Posted by samzenpus from the unplanned-obsolescence dept.
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "HP is suing Oracle for a breach of contract, claiming that Oracle was contractually obliged to continue supporting the Itanium architecture, which they recently nixed support for. Oracle has fired back that Itanium is essentially a dead architecture and will soon be discontinued by Intel. And so the blood feud continues between Oracle and HP."

Slashdot Top Deals